Miro Cellars
2012 Dry Creek Valley Petite Sirah
Petite Sirah
California: Dry Creek Valley
Mission Briefing
Perfection Redux
Okay, perhaps we should not be astonished with the superior quality of today’s Miro Cellars 2012 Dry Creek Valley Petite Sirah… but we are.
Miro has the distinction of being the producer of our most popular Petite Sirah sales over the last 7 years. Always, his Petite Sirahs break sales records, easily outpacing other producers by a wide margin.
When Miro offered us the worldwide exclusive on today’s wine, we leaped at the chance. Thanks, Miro, for allowing us early access to your fantastic 2012 Petite Sirah. This wine is perfectly balanced and extraordinarily flavorful. For such a young wine, this PS is drinking beautifully.
Enjoy this beauty with a very wide assortment of food choices. We’ll enjoy this very highly recommended wine with food and with great company. Because this impressive wine is under $23, we really recommend that you stock up.
Tasting Profile
| Look: | Deep garnet through and through, with a beautiful magenta at the very edge of the glass. |
|---|---|
| Smell: | Bright and fruity, with fresh blackberry, boysenberry, and blueberry balanced by black olive, sweet tobacco leaf, vanilla bean, violet petal, rosemary, sage, and black peppercorn. |
| Taste: | Absolutely delicious, with a palate similar to the nose, highlighted by fresh and candied berries, sweet tobacco, smoked meat, sweet vanilla, sage, and spicy black pepper. |
| Finish: | Luscious and almost impossibly soft, this is a truly fantastic wine with a well integrated finish highlighted by structured tannins and a very balanced acidity. |
| Pairing: | A classic French meal of steak frites. Season the ribeye with herbes de Provence and grill to perfection, completing the meal with a dollop of Roquefort cheese on the still warm steak. |
What the Winery Says
Miro Cellars hand crafts small lots of artisan wines from vineyards selected for their intense varietal characteristics and unique terroir. The 2012 vintage will go down in history as one of the better California vintages. 2012 delivered perfectly ripe, balanced fruit, and wine with great aromatics and solid structure. This Petite is a complex and age-worthy wine with abundant aromas and flavors of blueberries and blackberries. The finish is long, dark, and delicious.
The fruit was handled in the most gentle way possible, hand sorted and fermented in small open top fermentors with minimal hand punch-downs per day. As usual, the most effort was in extracting as little as possible of the massive tannins for which Petite is known. The malolactic fermentation was done in barrels; aged in 55% new European oak barrels for about 11 months.
The shortest way to describe the wine would be “dark and delicious” undoubtedly Petite Sirah in its core but with refined and balanced tannin and—surprising for Petite—softness. Loads of blueberry and blackberry on the nose followed by toasty oak, cinnamon, brown sugar and dark molasses. The mouth feel is big and juicy, extracted but not heavy, finishing with fresh acidity and a sense of balance. Cheers!
- Winemaker
- Miro Tcholakov
- Appellation
- Dry Creek Valley, Sonoma County, California
- Cooperage
- 11 months in European oak, 55% new
- ABV
- 14.4%
About the Winery
Born and raised in northern Bulgaria, a region with many millennia of winemaking history, Miro (Miroslav) Tcholakov was exposed to wine and winemaking at a very early age. His grandfather had long made the family supply of wine. As a boy, Miro was at his side during all phases of the process.
After completing his mandatory military service, he attended the Higher Institute of Agriculture in Plovdiv where he studied viticulture and enology. Soon after graduation, in the summer of 1990, he was chosen from hundreds of candidates to participate in an international exchange program in agriculture set up by The Future Farmers of America. After a few months in Napa, he was taken on as harvest intern at Sonoma County’s Dry Creek Vineyard. What was supposed to be a temporary harvest job turned into a nine-year position moving through the ranks from Cellar Master to Assistant Winemaker in 1997.
In 1998 Miro went to work as Winemaker for Trentadue Winery, which is still his “day job.” In addition to bringing more acclaim to the winery by creating world class award-winning wines, Miro’s duties include overseeing many custom crush operations for some renowned winemaker clients. In 2001, Miro became his own customer with his inaugural bottling of his Petite Sirah. Within a few weeks of its release, it received a fat 90 points and a “well-endowed” write-up from Robert Parker, Jr. in the Wine Advocate.